Parry, Milman

Parry, Milman

(1902–35) philologist; born in Oakland, Calif. Educated in both the United States and France, he pioneered in establishing that the Iliad and Odyssey were the works of a preliterate oral poetic tradition involving the use of repeated epithets. With Albert Bates Lord (Singer of Tales, 1960) he worked on the living oral tradition in Yugoslavia (1933–35), collecting more than 12,000 texts. He taught at Harvard from 1930 until his sudden death (possibly suicide) in 1935. In 1971, his son Adam Parry, also a promising classicist who died young, published The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry.

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